Italian Women Lead Grassroots Campaign Against US Military Base

"E noi che siamo donne, paura non abbiamo. La base non vogliamo, la base non vogliamo.”

And we who are women are not afraid. We don’t want the base, we don’t want the base.

The women singing and chanting at the head of the massive march on February 17 in the picturesque Italian town of Vicenza have been fighting to stop a U.S. military base from being built in their community. Cinzia Bottene, a housewife who has become the public face of the movement, was ecstatic with the turnout for the march, estimated by the police at 80,000 and by the organizers at 200,000. “We’ve never had anything like this before in the history of Vicenza. There were more people marching with us than the total population. The government, both nationally and locally, will no longer be able to ignore us.”  

Unlike campaigns organized by activists or political parties, this movement sprang from the community itself. The main organizers are Italian women, many of them housewives who were outraged when they learned that a US military base would be built on the site of an old airfield called Dal Molin. The old airfield, which is now a green space, is right next to their homes and is less than two miles from the city’s historic center.

“The military base will bring more traffic, more noise, more air pollution,” complained Cinzia. “You see how beautiful our city is? A new base will put a strain on our infrastructure, our services, and our resources. It will destroy our community.”  

The people of Vicenza take great pride in their city, which was declared a world heritage site by UNESCO in 1994 because of the number of buildings designed by the famous 16th-Century architect Andrea Palladio. The military base would be less than a mile from Palladio's ancient church in the Piazza dei Signori.

Many residents also worry that the new base will make Vicenza a target for a terrorist attack. “With the Bush policies causing so much resentment in the world, such a large base could get us caught up in Bush’s wars,” said Vicenza resident Anna Faggi. “

Vicenza already houses the US military base called Ederle, which has about 2,900 active duty military personnel. With the new base at the Dal Molin airport, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, a rapid reaction unit now spread between Italy and Germany, would be united. (Paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade were among the first troops involved in the Iraq war.) The combined force would bring the number of US military in Vicenza close to 5,000. Construction is scheduled to begin later this year and to be completed by 2011 at a cost of $576 million.